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Ejaz HaiderWednesday, January 22, 2014
From Print Edition
Let no words be minced. The rats are winning. They are winning the war psychologically (and ideologically). That is always the essence of any war but more so of irregular wars. Here’s how.
The first essential of fighting a war is to know the enemy. It is a truism mouthed by everyone but understood by a very few. The second is to define what fighting a war means. The third is to dedicate the energies to fighting a war if a war has to be fought: there’s no hemming and hawing about fighting. A woman can’t be half pregnant; neither can a war be fought half-heartedly.
On all these benchmarks, the state is failing. On all these benchmarks, the rats are winning. Consider.
Argument: this war began with America’s entry into Afghanistan. If we hadn’t allied with the US, we would be living in peace.
Fact: the war started much before the US invasion of Afghanistan. Afghanistan was fighting a civil war. Al-Qaeda had based itself there. Our sectarian and Islamist groups were fighting and training there. The youth was being sent from here; it also came from other countries. Afghanistan was a witches’ cauldron of Islamist International. AQ was planning and executing attacks on US and other interests from Afghanistan. They were protected by a ‘government’ which we, along with two other countries, recognised. No one else, nor the United Nations, did. The tribal areas were freely used for sanctuaries, training camps and illegal border crossing. Before 9/11, the state of Pakistan never checked this activity. The ‘calm’ was owed to state’s abdication of its authority.
Then 9/11 happened. The UN passed a series of resolutions under Chapter VII. Like other states we agreed to those resolutions. The US put together a coalition and attacked Afghanistan to oust a government that was harbouring Osama bin Laden and his AQ after our efforts to prevail upon the Taliban to give OBL up failed. As a ‘sovereign’ state, it was our responsibility to ensure that our territory is not used to destabilise Afghanistan where 45 countries of the world, not just the US, were present.
Suddenly, the groups, which drew cadres not just from Pakistan but also various other countries in the region and the world, felt the heat. They wanted the tribal areas to be free of any state control; the state could not afford that. There was contradiction between their and state’s interests.
Fact 2: To say that extending state control over one’s own territory is not a state’s responsibility is to undermine the most basic and essential trait of any state. To think that Pakistan could have cocked a snook at the world – not just the US – is to be either irredeemably stupid or deliberately misleading, mostly the latter. To argue that if we had told the Americans to take a hike and supposing that the Americans had tucked tail and run, the area would have remained ‘calm’ while the world fought the Taliban and the AQ in Afghanistan requires buying a map and taking another look at the options of anyone in Afghanistan who wants to relocate if something goes wrong in that country. The first stop is Pakistan.
Even if we had hermetically sealed ourselves from the war in Afghanistan politico-strategically, an impossibility, we would still be exposed to it and its fallout geographically. Fighters and refugees would still come in; we would still need to extend state control over the area. We would still have run afoul of these groups. We would still need to fight them.
Argument: The war started when we sent troops into Fata in 2004.
Fact: the year 2004 was not the first time troops went into Fata. Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the operational remit of the Peshawar Corps and its fighting formations. Troops – army/FC, Levies/Khasadars – have been deployed to Fata and employed in operations several times before. (I have explained this in more detail in my response to Imran Khan’s piece in this newspaper.) But quite apart from that, do people arguing this point imply that Fata is some kind of anachronistic museum that must be left to its own devices with no state interference even if it is strategically vital for the state to do so?
Argument: they are fighting us because the Americans drone them.
The implication of this argument is that if the Americans stopped droning them, they will become law-abiding citizens. Not only is this laughable and self-serving, it deliberately ignores the point that all the main leaders of the self-styled Tehreek-e-Taliban have been taken out by drones, not by the hundreds of military operations launched by us. If the rats have holed themselves up, it is because of this threat. They killed us before the Americans introduced drones in the theatre, they have killed us in cities across Pakistan and they will kill us more effectively if drones did not decapitate and degrade their leadership and cadres every now and then. Drones have also killed hundreds of Afghan Taliban leaders and fighters in Fata. Why don’t they kill us? Why just the Pakistani terrorist groups?
Argument: these groups are put up to this by India and the US.
This is the best one, actually. It suddenly makes an about-face from all the above and introduces an element which, if its proponents were not so dishonest to themselves and to logic, would rubbish all the above. But woe betide us if they were to accept the irony and the contradiction. I have seen many make all these arguments in one breath with nary a thought to the contradictions. Yes, there is evidence that hostile agencies have been handling some of these groups. But shouldn’t this fact serve as an argument against talking (especially from the position of weakness) rather than in support of it. Why would groups funded by hostile elements talk to us? And aren’t the hostile agencies exploiting the very ideological agenda which these groups have unleashed on this country?
Oh, but I forget. These are the groups we have to fight, not Fazlullah’s men. In which case, how about we tell Fazlullah to fight groups funded by India and the US and we will join him in doing that? The sheer idiocy of this what-aboutery is mind-blowing.
Finally, there’s no such thing as talking without fighting and vice versa. The state has exercised both options before. It is a ridiculous argument that the state should put everything on hold while it talks, or not talk at all while it fights. It has to weed out terrorist cells even as it talks. The talks-only club wants to put a moratorium on state responsibility and functioning. There are other fine points in devising a detailed strategy. Suffice to say that they are contained in the 3000-word review I did of the draft national internal security policy (NISP).
If the state wants to talk, it must first signal strength and resolve. It is a bogus argument that it should fight as a last resort against an existential threat.
The writer is a newspaper man.
He tweets @ejazhaider.
Terrorist threat and our what-abouters - Ejaz Haider
From Print Edition
Let no words be minced. The rats are winning. They are winning the war psychologically (and ideologically). That is always the essence of any war but more so of irregular wars. Here’s how.
The first essential of fighting a war is to know the enemy. It is a truism mouthed by everyone but understood by a very few. The second is to define what fighting a war means. The third is to dedicate the energies to fighting a war if a war has to be fought: there’s no hemming and hawing about fighting. A woman can’t be half pregnant; neither can a war be fought half-heartedly.
On all these benchmarks, the state is failing. On all these benchmarks, the rats are winning. Consider.
Argument: this war began with America’s entry into Afghanistan. If we hadn’t allied with the US, we would be living in peace.
Fact: the war started much before the US invasion of Afghanistan. Afghanistan was fighting a civil war. Al-Qaeda had based itself there. Our sectarian and Islamist groups were fighting and training there. The youth was being sent from here; it also came from other countries. Afghanistan was a witches’ cauldron of Islamist International. AQ was planning and executing attacks on US and other interests from Afghanistan. They were protected by a ‘government’ which we, along with two other countries, recognised. No one else, nor the United Nations, did. The tribal areas were freely used for sanctuaries, training camps and illegal border crossing. Before 9/11, the state of Pakistan never checked this activity. The ‘calm’ was owed to state’s abdication of its authority.
Then 9/11 happened. The UN passed a series of resolutions under Chapter VII. Like other states we agreed to those resolutions. The US put together a coalition and attacked Afghanistan to oust a government that was harbouring Osama bin Laden and his AQ after our efforts to prevail upon the Taliban to give OBL up failed. As a ‘sovereign’ state, it was our responsibility to ensure that our territory is not used to destabilise Afghanistan where 45 countries of the world, not just the US, were present.
Suddenly, the groups, which drew cadres not just from Pakistan but also various other countries in the region and the world, felt the heat. They wanted the tribal areas to be free of any state control; the state could not afford that. There was contradiction between their and state’s interests.
Fact 2: To say that extending state control over one’s own territory is not a state’s responsibility is to undermine the most basic and essential trait of any state. To think that Pakistan could have cocked a snook at the world – not just the US – is to be either irredeemably stupid or deliberately misleading, mostly the latter. To argue that if we had told the Americans to take a hike and supposing that the Americans had tucked tail and run, the area would have remained ‘calm’ while the world fought the Taliban and the AQ in Afghanistan requires buying a map and taking another look at the options of anyone in Afghanistan who wants to relocate if something goes wrong in that country. The first stop is Pakistan.
Even if we had hermetically sealed ourselves from the war in Afghanistan politico-strategically, an impossibility, we would still be exposed to it and its fallout geographically. Fighters and refugees would still come in; we would still need to extend state control over the area. We would still have run afoul of these groups. We would still need to fight them.
Argument: The war started when we sent troops into Fata in 2004.
Fact: the year 2004 was not the first time troops went into Fata. Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the operational remit of the Peshawar Corps and its fighting formations. Troops – army/FC, Levies/Khasadars – have been deployed to Fata and employed in operations several times before. (I have explained this in more detail in my response to Imran Khan’s piece in this newspaper.) But quite apart from that, do people arguing this point imply that Fata is some kind of anachronistic museum that must be left to its own devices with no state interference even if it is strategically vital for the state to do so?
Argument: they are fighting us because the Americans drone them.
The implication of this argument is that if the Americans stopped droning them, they will become law-abiding citizens. Not only is this laughable and self-serving, it deliberately ignores the point that all the main leaders of the self-styled Tehreek-e-Taliban have been taken out by drones, not by the hundreds of military operations launched by us. If the rats have holed themselves up, it is because of this threat. They killed us before the Americans introduced drones in the theatre, they have killed us in cities across Pakistan and they will kill us more effectively if drones did not decapitate and degrade their leadership and cadres every now and then. Drones have also killed hundreds of Afghan Taliban leaders and fighters in Fata. Why don’t they kill us? Why just the Pakistani terrorist groups?
Argument: these groups are put up to this by India and the US.
This is the best one, actually. It suddenly makes an about-face from all the above and introduces an element which, if its proponents were not so dishonest to themselves and to logic, would rubbish all the above. But woe betide us if they were to accept the irony and the contradiction. I have seen many make all these arguments in one breath with nary a thought to the contradictions. Yes, there is evidence that hostile agencies have been handling some of these groups. But shouldn’t this fact serve as an argument against talking (especially from the position of weakness) rather than in support of it. Why would groups funded by hostile elements talk to us? And aren’t the hostile agencies exploiting the very ideological agenda which these groups have unleashed on this country?
Oh, but I forget. These are the groups we have to fight, not Fazlullah’s men. In which case, how about we tell Fazlullah to fight groups funded by India and the US and we will join him in doing that? The sheer idiocy of this what-aboutery is mind-blowing.
Finally, there’s no such thing as talking without fighting and vice versa. The state has exercised both options before. It is a ridiculous argument that the state should put everything on hold while it talks, or not talk at all while it fights. It has to weed out terrorist cells even as it talks. The talks-only club wants to put a moratorium on state responsibility and functioning. There are other fine points in devising a detailed strategy. Suffice to say that they are contained in the 3000-word review I did of the draft national internal security policy (NISP).
If the state wants to talk, it must first signal strength and resolve. It is a bogus argument that it should fight as a last resort against an existential threat.
The writer is a newspaper man.
He tweets @ejazhaider.
Terrorist threat and our what-abouters - Ejaz Haider
